KNOCK OFFS

China’s Latest Knockoff? Goldman Sachs

Lloyd Blankfein, C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs (the real global company based in New York City).

By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

In what may be the most high-brow counterfeit to come out of China, there is now a knockoff Goldman Sachs operating just outside of Hong Kong.

Goldman Sachs (Shenzhen) Financial Leasing Co. has shared a name with the storied investment bank since May 2013, according to Bloomberg, using the same Chinese characters as the U.S. bank’s and an English font that bears a striking resemblance to the actual Goldman logotype.

A woman who answered the company’s phone told the Agence France-Presse that it doesn’t have any connection with the U.S. Goldman Sachs.

“We just picked the name out and it’s not intentionally the same,” she told the A.F.P. before hanging up.

An official Hong Kong–based Goldman spokeswoman confirmed to Bloomberg that the bank does not, in fact, have ties to the Chinese impostor and it was “looking into the matter.”

Apparently, faux banks are the new faux Louis Vuitton bags and Rolexes, because just a few weeks earlier, a man in eastern China was arrested for running a fake branch of China Construction Bank, complete with signs, card readers, and three teenage tellers, who turned out to be his 15-year-old daughter and her classmates, the Financial Times reported.